In an interview with Fortune Magazine yesterday, Eric Schmidt CEO of search engine Google.com
described the current newspaper industry crisis almost as I understood
his explanation as an irrevocable transfer from contained printed
newspaper articles to an online community of people who “love reading,
discussing it, adding to it, annotating it “.
Google’s own news aggregator was launched back in February 2002 with
over 4000 news sources being collected from publishers, this provided
something of a quantam leap for the company who had previously only
collected 150 news sources, it began to raise many questions amongst newspaper publishers in 2007 over how Google was “indexing their headlines and offer users a synopsis of their stories without paying them a dime”.
And yet still, I believe we are seeing Google’s defiance continue to
be a little more cooperative towards the newspaper industry, Eric
Schmidt’s simple assumption that Google showing compassion to helping
the newspapers is going to make things all better, is a slightly
offbeat remark which I don’t believe will strike well with the
publishers concerned, he even tells Fortune Magazine how Google is
helping to offer newspapers great monetization options.
Of course these monetization options are naturally from Google, and
whilst newspapers continue to write great online content which brings
in millions of viewers every month, these monetization options just
help Google become that little bit richer, they have lost all sense of
purpose by saying they can help newspapers by getting more money off
the news articles, and Eric Schmidt appears to continue the article by
covering up the tracks of being very blatant about helping to make
Google richer by saying
“I wish I had a brilliant idea, but I don’t. These little things help, but they don’t fundamentally solve the problem.”
The main question I pose is where does Google’s belief in the world’s information being free come into play here, as much as I believe Google has helped harness a lot of information well in it’s educational archive and Book search,
I still think that this model in Google News is slightly off balance,
and that Google don’t really seem to care about newspapers in the long
run, as much as where and when those advertising dollars are going to
arrive in Google’s backpocket, now I acknowledge as well that this
money is shared with publishers and it wouldn’t make Google super rich,
but I think they need to be more fair to newspapers who are trying to
transition online, obviously trying to cover the losses they are making
from the decline of newspaper sales.
Email me at:
joshchandler@technologygazette.com
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